Stephen Prina is an American artist, musician, and composer. He currently splits his time between Los Angeles, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is a professor at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
Background
Stephen Prina was born in 1954, in Galesburg, Illinois, United States. Peter (Pietro) Prina, his father, played clarinet for the local band in the Comune di Canischio, in the Piedmont region of Northwestern Italy. One day the Black Shirts arrived and demanded that the band perform the anthem of the Italian National Fascist Party. This event convinced him it was time to emigrate from Italy — immigrate to America— at the age of 17 in 1923.
Education
Born in 1954, in Galesburg, Illinois, Prina received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University in 1977 and an Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1980. In 1980, he also attended Thomas E. Crow's class on Courbet and Manet at UCLA.
Career
Prina works in a variety of media including musical performances. Each piece is related in some way and develops in a series of long-term projects that he frequently rearranges and re-presents in different exhibition and associative contexts. In “Exquisite Corpse”, a series begun in 1988, he set out to make a painting of the same size and shape as every painting recorded in a 1969 catalogue raisonné of Manet's works.
Prina is also a composer and musician who has interpreted works by Beethoven, Schoenberg, Sonic Youth, Steely Dan and many others. He taught at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, from 1980 until 2003. In 1994, he offered a much-discussed course about filmmaking in the 1980s and focused the class on Keanu Reeves as the actor had appeared in a diverse set of films that each exemplified a specific style; the course prompted stories in The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. Prina has been a professor at Harvard since 2004.
Stephen Prina’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions worldwide. His exhibition “galesburg, illinois+” opened at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland in September 2015 and traveled to the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany in January 2016, and finally to Petzel, New York in June 2016. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted in museums throughout Europe and the United States including Spruth Magers, Los Angeles (2018); Museo Madre, Naples (2017); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2016); Vienna Secession (2011); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaeno, Seville (2008); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the Art Institute of Chicago (2002); MAMCO, Geneva (1998); Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1992); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1989).
He has participated in Documenta IX, the Venice Biennale XLIV, and the 51st Carnegie International. Prina has also been a willing collaborator, having co-produced significant exhibitions and projects with artists Wade Guyton, Mike Kelley, the band Red Krayola and curator Susanne Ghez at The Renaissance Society. Prina is represented by Petzel Gallery in New York, Maureen Paley in London, and Capitain Petzel in Berlin.
His work can be seen in public collections at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Views
Stephen Prina is an artist whose deconstructive and playful approach to culture, art, language, and authorship often begets the label “post-Conceptualist”. He addresses the institutions, markets, and historiography that shape our perception of art. Believing an artwork “only has meaning when it enters the social sphere and meets its audience,” Prina’s artistic practice includes installations, performance, sculpture, and painting that centers on what happens to art when it leaves the studio.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
His exhibition making can be seen as a kind of overarching work itself. Certainly, his fastidious and almost exaggerated attention to framing, labeling, forms of display, presentation and cataloguing seem to approach institutional parody without being overtly didactic.